Public Surveys at ESO

摘要

ESO has a strong mandate to survey the Southern Sky. In this article, we describe the ESO telescopes and instruments that are currently used for ESO Public Surveys, and the future plans of the community with the new wide-field-spectroscopic instruments. We summarize the ESO policies governing the management of these projects on behalf of the community. The on-going ESO Public Surveys and their science goals, their status of completion, and the new projects selected during the second ESO VISTA call in 2015/2016 are discussed. We then present the impact of these projects in terms of current numbers of refereed publications and the scientific data products published through the ESO Science Archive Facility by the survey teams, including the independent access and scientific use of the published survey data products by the astronomical community.